12 Years ago Bitcoin Whale Who Hodled Through Thick and Thin Sells 500 Coins Worth $47.77 Million

March 20 — Anchorage Digital told The Block its institutional-focused Atlas platform is adding collateral management and monitoring services, targeting institutional borrowers and lenders. The new offering includes 24/7 real-time collateral monitoring, automatic margin call notifications, and other features tailored for a wide range of digital asset-collateralized transactions. These cover collateralized loans, convertible bonds, warehouse financing, structured products, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, equipment procurement, PIPE financing, and various other scenarios.

March 20: Per an AXIOS report, Anthropic held a closed-door meeting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The talks centered primarily on model distillation and export controls, with the Pentagon’s dispute not taking center stage.

On March 20, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a new Russia-related general license allowing the delivery and sale of Russian-origin crude oil and petroleum products loaded onto vessels before March 12. This authorization is valid through 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time on April 11, 2026. While the key terms align with the license issued earlier on March 12, Thursday’s waiver explicitly excludes transactions involving North Korea, Cuba, and Crimea. The temporary easing of sanctions on Russian oil is part of the Trump administration’s efforts to ease energy prices pushed up by the Middle East conflict. (Jinse)

On March 20, X Product Lead Nikita Bier shared a post noting: “X is rolling out an article summary feature. Just click the ‘Summarize’ button to quickly figure out if the piece is worth your time.”

Today, March 20, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Michael Smith—a Cornelius, North Carolina resident—has pleaded guilty to his role in a streaming royalty fraud scheme. According to the indictment and court filings, Smith leveraged AI to mass-produce hundreds of thousands of songs. He then operated automated bot accounts to artificially stream these tracks billions of times, mimicking real user listening behavior. Affected platforms include Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Streaming platforms distribute royalties from a shared pool to rights holders based on play counts; large-scale fraudulent traffic siphons legitimate creators’ rightful earnings to fraudsters. To avoid triggering platforms’ abnormal traffic detection, Smith spread bot streams across thousands of tracks, intentionally keeping individual play counts below suspicious peaks. These tactics netted him over $8.09 million in fraudulent royalties. Smith plea